Have a ball with world snooker champ Dennis Taylor at The Grand, Clitheroe

Tony Dewhurst

Dennis Taylor chuckles down the telephone and with that gentle Northern Irish lilt he recalls an ungodly hour in an airport car park somewhere, when a shadowy figure confronts him a few rows away.

“It was 5am, and suddenly there’s this chap doing a mime of putting a snooker cue above his head,” said Taylor.

“And then he put his glasses the wrong way up and shouted, ‘Alright Dennis.

“I’ve been in supermarkets, queues at the bank, waiting for a train or on the golf course and people still waggle their finger at me and do that.

“It’s lovely, you know, after all this time.”

That distinctive cameo was Taylor’s DIY celebration at the conclusion of the greatest snooker match ever played, dubbed the Black Ball Final, and the memories remained undimmed for the man and his specially designed oversized snooker spectacles.

Taylor’s recovery from eight frames down to beat Steve Davis on the last black at the 1985 World Championship final provided the most extraordinary sporting story, and is still the most watched programme in BBC Two history.

And Taylor will roll back the years tomorrow at The Grand, Clitheroe, for a fun evening he describes as “lots of banter, chat, laughter and exhibition snooker”.

“I’d been trying for many years to be a champion, so there’s me winning it, with the big, silly upside-down glasses, waving the cue above my head and wagging my finger at the camera.

“I don’t think any Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared come up with a conclusion like that.

“My two sons hadn’t been able to come to the Crucible at Sheffield because of school, but they’d put a big banner across the front of our house in Blackburn.

“And what was so lovely about it was it didn’t say anything about being world champion.